Financial Organization and Communication Platform for Advisors, Clients, and Professional Service Partners
PROJECT TYPE
System and Brand Redesign
MY ROLE
Lead Product Designer
PLATFORM
Web
TOOLS
Figma, FigJam, Jira, Paper
What is WealthTeamWork?
WealthTeamWork is a web and mobile platform designed to help independent financial advisors and the households they serve manage financial records collaboratively. The platform enables households to organize financial documents, communicate with their advisors, and track their net worth in one centralized space.
With features like secure messaging, task assignments, and record comments, WealthTeamWork fosters seamless collaboration between users, their advisors, and other professional service partners. By streamlining financial organization and enhancing communication, the platform empowers households to take control of their financial future with confidence.
My Role as Lead Product Designer
As the Lead Product Designer at WealthTeamWork, I was responsible for completely transforming the platform’s user experience and visual design. Before my involvement, the web and mobile applications were built solely by developers, resulting in a disorganized, inconsistent, and unintuitive interface. My role was to bring structure, clarity, and usability to the platform by:
Overhauling the Entire UX/UI: I redesigned the platform from the ground up, ensuring a seamless and intuitive experience for both financial advisors and households.
Establishing a Design System: I created a scalable and cohesive design system to ensure consistency across the web and mobile applications.
Implementing New Branding: I integrated refined branding guidelines to align the platform’s visuals with its mission and audience.
Enhancing Navigation & Usability: I restructured the information architecture to simplify workflows and improve overall user efficiency.
Collaborating with Developers & Stakeholders: I worked closely with engineers, product managers, and leadership to ensure seamless implementation and alignment with business goals.
This redesign was more than just a visual refresh—it was about creating a structured, user-friendly experience that empowered users to manage their financial lives with ease.
DESIGN QUESTION
How can we transform WealthTeamWork’s web and mobile platform into a cohesive, user-friendly experience that aligns with new branding guidelines, improves usability, and provides a seamless workflow for financial advisors and households?
Navigating Limited Data
In the early stages of the redesign, we created a user survey to gather valuable insights from WealthTeamWork's small user base. Unfortunately, we did not receive enough meaningful responses to generate actionable data, given the limited number of active users. This posed a challenge as we had to adjust our research strategy to keep the project on track.
Fortunately, one of the startup's co-founders, an independent financial advisor, provided invaluable insight into the needs and behaviors of our target users. Using his industry knowledge, we were able to create detailed user personas that represented the diverse user groups we were designing for. These personas became the foundation for our design decisions, helping us empathize with our users and ensuring we kept their needs in focus throughout the process.
While the survey didn't yield the results we had hoped for, we remained committed to gathering user feedback and planned to review the redesigned platform with specific user groups before launch. This would give us an opportunity to validate our design choices and fine-tune the user experience before going live.
Meet our Users!
Where the Old Design Fell Short
The original WealthTeamWork platform had several key issues that hindered usability:
Chaotic Styling: Inconsistent CSS and mismatched elements led to a disjointed, unpolished look.
Lack of Optimization for Laptop Screens: The site was only properly displayed on large desktops, leaving users with smaller screens, including laptops, struggling with broken layouts.
Confusing Navigation: The platform lacked intuitive pathways, making it difficult for users to find what they needed.
Information Overload: Too much information was shown at once, overwhelming users and making it hard to focus on key tasks.
These pain points highlighted the need for a clean, user-friendly redesign focused on consistency, clarity, and responsiveness.
New Look, New Feel
The branding overhaul was the starting point of the WealthTeamWork redesign, setting the foundation for the entire application refresh. We moved away from the traditional, overly corporate look common in finance apps and gave the brand a modern, tech-forward identity. Fonts, colors, and a new logo were chosen to convey innovation, trust, and approachability.
The new logo incorporates yin and yang symbolism to represent balance—a core principle in personal finance. The growing stroke weight symbolizes growth, and the circular pattern evokes continuous improvement and financial progress.
This branding redesign established a cohesive, modern identity that paved the way for the application’s visual and functional overhaul.
Laying the Groundwork
I decided to start the redesign with the web version of the application, as most of our users primarily engaged with the platform through their desktops. The mobile version would follow secondarily.
The main goal of our low-fidelity wireframes was to establish the overall structure of the app, focusing on navigation as the critical element to refine. We opted for a two-tiered navigation system to simplify the user experience and ensure ease of access to important features.
Top Horizontal Navigation: This tier would house user-related items like household selection, administrator functions, and profile settings.
Vertical Side Navigation: This would display household-specific options, such as Overview, Net Worth, Activity, and Record Categories (e.g., taxes, business, real estate) for the selected household.
This structure allowed us to keep global and household-specific actions clearly separated, helping users navigate the app efficiently and intuitively.
Navigation
Household Overview
Record Views
Building on the Foundation
With the low-fidelity wireframes establishing the overall structure and navigation for the new WealthTeamWork application, we moved on to building out the mid-fidelity wireframes. These designs allowed us to refine the core features and start introducing more detailed elements.
Our low-fidelity wireframes had already shown us the essential components the app would need, so we began developing a full design system to bring these components to life. This system included everything from buttons and forms to icons and typography, all aligned with the new branding guidelines.
The design system not only helped us accelerate development but also ensured consistency across all screens and scalability for future iterations of the app. By creating a flexible and cohesive system, we were setting the foundation for a seamless user experience that could grow alongside the product.
Household Overview
Chat Feature
Record Categories
Record View
A New Audience and New Challenges
While working on the mid-fidelity wireframes, we were informed that WealthTeamWork would pivot its target audience. Originally focused on selling to financial advisory firms, the startup decided to expand its reach by offering the platform to companies as an employee benefit. This shift in focus greatly expanded our user groups, introducing a new set of challenges.
We had to step back and reassess the design to accommodate a diverse user base—employees from various industries with different financial needs and goals. This required us to revisit the wireframes and user flows to ensure the platform could serve this broader audience while still maintaining a simple and effective user experience.
The End of the Road: Project Unfinished
A few weeks after we pivoted the platform's target audience, the startup's employees were informed that the company would be suspending operations due to a lack of investor interest. Unfortunately, this meant that we were never able to finish the redesign.
Several important features were still in progress, including:
A comprehensive resource for financial literacy and education, aimed at equipping users with the knowledge to make informed financial decisions.
An overhauled onboarding flow that would simplify user registration and help users easily navigate the platform's key features.
Streamlined user management processes for both financial advisors and household leaders, making it easier to manage accounts, assign tasks, and track progress.
Despite these challenges, the progress we made laid a strong foundation for the platform’s future direction. I’m proud of the work we accomplished and the potential it created for WealthTeamWork moving forward.
